The second single from Brightr’s upcoming album Year Two is here. Never Home, Never Mind arrives today via Sugar-Free Records and follows April’s Charles Petrescu—the first new material from Laurie Cottingham in years. The UK-based singer-songwriter, long hailed as one of the most quietly persistent figures in the emo pop underground, is now set to release Year Two on July 4, following nearly a decade of writing, touring, and emotional upheaval.
Never Home, Never Mind was produced by Matt O’Grady (You Me At Six, Don Broco, Deaf Havana), continuing the sonic thread established on Charles Petrescu, but pushing further into vulnerability.
Cottingham explains, “The title comes from a line in the chorus, not something I often do, but it resonated, so I did it. It is a song about mistakes, about inflicting sadness on someone you love above everyone else, about messing up, but about trying every day to do better and make things feel better for that person.”
The track leans into intricate midwest emo guitars and a warming vocal delivery that showcases the quieter weight of Brightr’s sound. It doesn’t try to dazzle—it reflects. “It’s painful, it’s poppy, deeply honest and brutally vulnerable. It’s joyfully crushing but it’s me,” Cottingham says about the album as a whole.
Year Two has been a long time coming. “I’ve been writing Year Two pretty much since I completed Year One, but it’s been a lengthy work in progress: with an EP, a pandemic and multiple split records in between. I think it ultimately took a while to finish some of these songs and bring others to the surface because I’d buried the feelings and memories so far down, or maybe even morphed the true narrative of them to feel better than they were to somehow protect myself,” Cottingham admits.
The album follows Year One (2016) and marks not just a continuation but an emotional purging. Though sadder and more stripped back than its predecessor, the record doesn’t stray far from the artist’s roots in delicate, melody-laced introspection. The sound is familiar to anyone who’s followed Cottingham since the early Lanterns EP days—acoustic emo filtered through a lens of real-life emotional residue.
Cottingham doesn’t shy away from acknowledging how long this journey has been—both artistically and personally. “I basically said I was done with music… but it didn’t work,” he recalled of the early days after his band broke up. “I became depressed and withdrawn trying to suppress my musical self… I lasted under a month before songs were spilling out of me.”
Those songs eventually led him to stages across Europe and North America, with appearances at The Fest, Manchester Punk Festival, and even a show in an abandoned German train station. His music has consistently straddled the line between melancholy and comfort. “My songs lyrically tend to be very bleakly sad with little hints of hopefulness alongside pretty, almost poppy melodies at times.”
This balance is also what draws comparisons to acts like Into It. Over It., Dashboard Confessional, and City and Colour, though Cottingham also cites Owen and Andy McKee among his broader influences.
A full track-by-track commentary by Cottingham will follow soon. For now, listeners are invited to sit with Never Home, Never Mind, a song that doesn’t ask for forgiveness but offers a quiet recognition of harm—and the effort it takes to grow from it.
“Whatever the reason, Year Two is finally here,” Laurie says. And with that, the next chapter of Brightr begins—slower, sadder, but still determined.
Brightr 2025 Live Shows:
28th June @ The Village Pump, Trowbridge
4th July @ Jacs, Aberdare
11th July @ 2000 Trees Festival (Camp Frabbit)
25th July @ TBC, Brighton
26th July @ Herofest, Gravesend
14th August @ Belfast
15th August @ Dublin
16th August @ Galway
